Recording VHS : to HD

jonski

Chancing my arm posting here but can't see anywhere more appropriate .


I have old VHS tapes , the old home videos of the kids when they were younger ( and cute ) as opposed to the grumpy teenagers that have replaced them . I recently got a PC that has windows Vista and an old hauppage tv card and thought to myself I could use it to transfer those old tapes to digital before they deteriorate to far .

Would anyone have any hints or tips on how to go about this ? and also what would be a good program to do it with ? and more to the point are there any free programs that would be any good at doing this ?

thanks in advance for any advice .

John

dmck

whats the model of the hauppage card?

d

jonski

dmck wrote: »

whats the model of the hauppage card?

d

Sorry , forgot about that part : Hauppauge WinTv 878/9 thats what it says in the control panel but if I remember correctly when I reinstalled Vista I installed it as a wintv pvr 300 or 350

dmck

not very familiar with those cards but the link below may help (click on the faq)

http://www.hauppauge.com/site/support/support_mce.html#record


d

SouperComputer

jonski wrote: »

Sorry , forgot about that part : Hauppauge WinTv 878/9 thats what it says in the control panel but if I remember correctly when I reinstalled Vista I installed it as a wintv pvr 300 or 350

Hmmm, those are two very different cards its describing. The 878/9 is a "framebuffer" card. These are actually the best for analog capture from tape as you can capture raw, uncompressed video with them. Therefore you can do the required cropping etc before compressing.

The PVR series are, well, for PVR use. They have an onboard MPEG2 encoder that compresses on the fly, you cannot get uncompressed video from one of these. You can still use it of course.

It depends on how fussy you want to be about keeping as much quality as possible. Heres a guide that will get you started, its an oldie, but a goodie:

http://arstechnica.com/guides/tweaks/vidcap.ars

If the footage is of sentimental value, it might be worth purchasing a pro-grade VHS deck for the project and then sell it when you are done. Net cost will be 100-150 and well worth it IMO.

Also checkout doom9: http://forum.doom9.org/forumdisplay.php?f=10

SouperComputer

Other options:

Use a D-VHS deck to capture via firewire.
Use a decent SVHS/Pro VHS/Bog standard Multi Head VHS with a Canopus ADVC-100 or ADVC 300